All you pro-vaccine people really get me.In other words, you were trolling for a reaction.
Every time someone or agency comes out with information that something should be done "for your own good, and the good of society" you used to rail against it.
It sounds like the type of argument that the Bush administration used to use to pass PATRIOT acts.
Do it. Do it all. Do it now. Don't question it. You'll be sorry later if you don't.
Well, you can take your herd mentality and shove it where the herd don't graze.
The risk is my own children, not the herd.
If my child doesn't get vac. and yours does, and they play together, yours won't get diseases because they've been vacced. Mine doesn't get it because yours have been vacced. Unless, you know, they aren't 100% effective, which they aren't. Even with the full regimen of vaccs, you can still contract the disease, sometimes, if it didn't take. So all you have is a false sense of security. At least I know to blame myself if something happens. Who will you, or can you blame if you get them and still contract the disease? Nobody. Nobody will listen to you, and you will get shouted down on internet forums.
I don't generally trust doctors for much. I've been mis-diagnosed, overcharged, and given the wrong prescripts because they were free samples that would "probably do the same thing" to what I needed. (antibiotics) Both my kids were homebirthed, and have never been to see a doctor in their lives. 3 years. They are both extremely healthy. They'll probably be homeschooled, too.
But what the hell do I know. I also don't declaw my cats, and haven't circumcised my little boy either. It's just another one of those hard decisions that you have to make when raising your own kids.
If you want mandatory intervention in your lives and the lives of those around you, there are plenty of OTHER countries that will be happy to oblige. This is land of freedom, and the freedom to do or not with my own body and my kids is one of the freedoms I cherish most.
Vaccines are recommended for very young children because their immune systems are not yet fully mature and also because their stomachs produce less acid, making it easier for ingested bacteria and viruses to multiply. These factors leave them the most vulnerable to the devastating effects of these serious diseases.
"I personally believe breathatarianism to be the highest mode of human living breathing in pure air, absorbing the direct light and energies of the sun, bathing in pure water. I look at the obituaries every morning and ain't nobody listed but you eaters."You have to appreciate crazy on that level.
A "triggered" autism diagnosis wouldn't present the same sort of straightforward danger. But autism is difficult. A very large fraction of autistic-spectrum children will require heroic care from their parents for their entire lives.I thought autism-spectrum diagnoses were becoming more common but on average much less spectacular, what with all the "Bill Gates == Aspergers" type ideas which have been permeating the culture since Rain Man.
Sheep moo? News to me.The ones who don't follow the herd do.
Before hepatitis B vaccination programs became routine in the United States, an estimated 30%–40% of chronic infections are believed to have resulted from perinatal or early childhood transmission, even though even though [under] 10% of reported cases of hepatitis B occurred in children aged [under] 10 years. Chronically infected persons are at increased lifetime risk for cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and also serve as the main reservoir for continued HBV transmission...The reasons for the vaccine being administered in this way are fairly obvious: you don't know whether the mother has Hep B, because even with routine testing of expectant mothers for the disease, you won't catch all the cases - the mothers never show up in the health system before they go into labour, mothers miss the screening (and those whose lifestyle may put them at risk of Hep B may also be more likely to miss it), or the screening returns a false negative. You don't need to be living a wild lifestyle to be at risk of transmission: babies get grazes, broken skin, etc. You can routinely test the mothers, but you can't routinely test everybody who may at some point care for the child. I'm sure you can think of others reasons.
...During 1990–2004, incidence of acute hepatitis B in the United States declined 75%. The greatest decline (94%) occurred among children and adolescents, coincident with an
increase in hepatitis B vaccine coverage.
A Comprehensive Immunization Strategy to Eliminate Transmission of Hepatitis B Virus Infection in the United States
Little Grace died in the fall. She was a beautiful little girl. But she only lived a little over two years. She died of polio and she suffered. She had a slight fever for a couple of days, but it didn't seem like anything and we just kept her in bed. And we would certainly have called the doctor, but the fever dropped, she seemed to be all right. So we thought it had just been a cold. Then, one day, she was up, playing, Isabel was in the kitchen fixing lunch for the two boys when they'd come in from school, and she heard Grace fall down in the living room. When you have a lot of children you don't always start running when one of them falls, unless they start screaming or something. And, this time, Gracie was quiet. Yet, Isabel says that when she heard that thump and then that silence, something happened to her to make her afraid. And she ran to the living room and there was little Grace on the floor, all twisted up, and the reason she hadn't screamed was that she couldn't get her breath. And when she did scream, it was the worst sound, Isabel says, that she'd ever heard in all her life, and she still hears it sometimes in her dreams. Isabel will sometimes wake me up with a low, moaning, strangling sound and I have to be quick to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel is weeping against me seems a mortal wound. -- James Baldwin, Sonny's BluesAnd I read that and was happy Polio is not something many people need to be afraid of anymore.
I don't want to know the gruesome details, but I really want to know how someone manages to get decapitated in this age.There can be only one!
But the family itself is not beyond regulation in the public interest, as against a claim of religious liberty. And neither rights of religion nor rights of parenthood are beyond limitation. Acting to guard the general interest in youth's wellbeing, the state, as parens patriae, may restrict the parent's control by requiring school attendance, regulating or prohibiting the child's labor and in many other ways. Its authority is not nullified merely because the parent grounds his claim to control the child's course of conduct on religion or conscience. Thus, he cannot claim freedom from compulsory vaccination for the child more than for himself on religious grounds. The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death. The catalogue need not be lengthened. It is sufficient to show what indeed appellant hardly disputes, that the state has a wide range of power for limiting parental freedom and authority in things affecting the child's welfare, and that this includes, to some extent, matters of conscience and religious conviction....A democratic society rests, for its continuance, upon the healthy, well rounded growth of young people into full maturity as citizens, with all that implies. It may secure this against impeding restraints and dangers within a broad range of selection. Among evils most appropriate for such action are the crippling effects of child employment, more especially in public places, and the possible harms arising from other activities subject to all the diverse influences of the street. It is too late now to doubt that legislation appropriately designed to reach such evils is within the state's police power, whether against the parent's claim to control of the child or one that religious scruples dictate contrary action.Prince v. Massachusetts, 312 U.S. 158 (1944) (internal citations omitted).
I stand by everything I have written and the conclusions I have previously reached: that the clinical jury is still out on the risks of MMR; that the epidemiological research on which the claims are based that it has conclusively been proved to be safe is at best methodologically inadequate and at worst has been misleadingly spun; that although any link to MMR remains unproven, Wakefield’s Lancet findings of a new clinical syndrome have been replicated; and that far from being, as it is claimed, conclusively disproved, his concern that while the vast majority of children have no side effects from MMR a small proportion may be vulnerable through the impact of the vaccine on some kind of pre-existing vulnerability looks ever more plausible.posted by BinGregory at 7:58 PM on February 19, 2009
W: Below is a list of the allegations made by Brain Deer against me, received on Friday 6th February 2009, 2 days prior to his publishing in the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper.That quote, and the rest of the dialog, is in Phillips' article. She doesn't understand muslims either, but that doesn't stop me from garnering useful information wherever it may present itself.
Dear Dr Wakefield,
I'm directed by editors managing my investigation of the MMR matter for The Sunday Times to inform you that we intend to publish further on this topic, and particularly on your role in it. It is now some five years since I first sought to discuss with you your work, and I've made numerous attempts to do so. As you will appreciate, the safety of children by means of vaccination is an unparalleled issue of public interest and concern.
As you will know, not least as a result of our concurrent attendance at the General Medical Council fitness to practise hearing into your conduct, I'm now extremely familiar with the precise medical histories, diagnoses and so forth of the children enrolled for your study, published in the Lancet on 28 February 1998. Based on this knowledge, and other sources of information, including the cooperation of families enrolled in your research, I must put to you, for your response, a number of serious matters.
(1)That you repeatedly, and without justification, changed and misreported findings from those children for publication in the Lancet.
I cite, for instance, three children who you represented as having regressive autism, who in fact had Asperger's disorder, or in one of those cases PDAS, which are not regressive and involve no loss of language or other basic skills. You claim that the paper is a series of "previously normal" children, but medical records - which you had a duty to read and understand - show that some five of the 12 children were subject to concerns prior to vaccination, and were not "normal". Other children, who you claimed to have suffered their first "behavioural symptoms" within days of vaccination, in fact had none for months. In the cases of some 8 children - two thirds of the total - you changed normal histopathology results to abnormal results, in a so-called "research review", despite claiming that the series was merely a clinical report.
W: The diagnoses reported in the Lancet were accurate based upon the information provided to the clinicians and review of the available records. (I) Where there was considered to be a pre-existing developmental problem, this was accurately reported in the Lancet paper. (II) This is not the place to get into a detailed discussion on developmental regression which is still a subject of debate [among? - BG] experts in child development and is certainly not something about which Deer has any expertise.
It is a matter of fact that I did not play any part whatsoever in making the microscopic diagnoses of inflammation on any biopsy from any child investigated at the Royal Free Hospital. Intestinal tissues were examined, and the children’s pathology documented, by two doctors (not me) employed in the Department of Histopathology who were experienced in bowel disease, using an agreed protocol to ensure rigor and consistency . These doctors were co-authors on the paper. The same tissues were reviewed by Professor Walker-Smith and his team. I merely entered the documented findings into the Lancet paper. I did not “change” any findings as alleged. The paper was then reviewed by the relevant authors prior to submission to the Lancet in order to confirm that the diagnoses were correct. The findings reported in the Lancet are, in the opinion of the relevant authors, correct. This is a matter of record at the GMC.
No credible evidence of an involvement of MMR with either autism or Crohn's disease was found. No field studies of the vaccine's effectiveness were found but the impact of mass immunisation on the elimination of the diseases has been demonstrated worldwide.Another nice PDF from them:
The Cochrane Collaboration publishes the most thorough survey of MMR vaccination which strongly supports its use. There was no credible evidence behind claims of harm from the MMR vaccination.If you respect the Cochrane group and what they do enough to cite them, then you should be supporting the MMR vaccine -- becuase their analysis is saying that despite the existence of some poorly constructed studies, the evidence strongly supports the use of MMR vaccines and points to no correlation with autism risk.
This is the conclusion drawn by the Cochrane Review Authors, an international team
of researchers, after carefully drawing together all of the evidence found in 31 high
quality studies from around the world. They also highlight that the policy of
encouraging mass use of MMR has eliminated the scourge of measles, mumps and
rubella from many countries.
“In particular we conclude that all the major unintended events, such as triggering
Crohn’s disease or autism, were suspected on the basis of unreliable evidence,” says
lead author Dr Vittorio Demicheli ...
“Public health decisions need to be based on sound evidence. If this principle had
been applied in the case of the MMR dispute, then we would have avoided all the
fuss,” says Demicheli.
The success of the large-scale vaccination programmes in developed countries has
tended to induce a sense of complacency, but measles, mumps and rubella are serious
diseases that can cause permanent physical damage or even kill. Indeed, in developing
countries where vaccination is less prevalent, the mortality rate from these diseases is
high.
The MMR vaccine was introduced in the USA in the 1970s and is now in use in over
90 countries around the world. A single research paper published in 1998 based on 12
children cast doubt on the safety of the vaccine by implying that it might cause
development problems like Crohn’s disease and autism². The paper has since been
retracted by most of the original authors, but before that it triggered a worldwide
scare, which in turn resulted in reduced uptake of the vaccine³.
Aware of the controversy surrounding the use of MMR, members of The Cochrane
Collaboration set out to review the evidence for effectiveness of the vaccine and also
to review evidence of adverse events. In a process of ‘systematic reviewing’
researchers searched international databases and found 139 articles about MMR use.
Because many of them referred to studies that had been conducted in a way that could
not rule out bias or error, the researchers discarded all but 31 of them. Using
rigorously established methods the researchers then synthesised the findings from
these pieces of higher-quality research to create the most authoritative assessment yet
available.
The systematic review’s key findings are that:
1. There is no credible link between the MMR vaccine and any long-term disability,
including Crohn’s disease and autism.
2. MMR is an important vaccine that has prevented diseases that still carry a heavy
burden of death and complications where the vaccine is not used consistently.
3. The lack of confidence in MMR has caused great damage to public health.
4. People arguing for or against the use of any therapy need to make sure that t
heybase their conclusions on carefully collected evidence, not just on biased opinion,
speculation or suspicion.
Before the diphtheria immunization became common, the United States had some 200,000 cases and 15,000 deaths per year from the disease, 80% of them children. Post-immunization: 41 total reported cases in the US from 1980 to 1995.Anyone who can look at statistics like that and still bleat "but vaccines haven't been shown to be SAFE!!!!" should be forced to wear a scarlet letter B for "brainless." It's so breathtakingly stupid -- really, there is no other word for it, no polite way to describe the total unmooring from fact-based reality and elementary reasoning -- as to beggar belief.
posted by Justinian at 7:48 AM on February 16, 2009